“He said he was sure he would be punished when he returned to America,” said an 18-year-old who goes by the nom de guerre “Talha.” He is a Pakistani fighter with the underground Islamic militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, or “Movement of Holy Warriors,” which Lindh briefly joined in the summer of 2001 before signing on with the Taliban.

Talha, speaking through a translator, said he knew Lindh by his two aliases, Abdul Hamid and Suleyman al-Faris, when the two trained together at one of the group’s guerrilla camps in Mansehra, a small mountain town in northern Pakistan sitting just west of Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan region bordering India.

Training with at Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in the summer of 2001 was Lindh’s first real effort at jihad, or Islamic holy war. Lindh had spent roughly six months studying the Quran at a hardscrabble madrassa in Bannu, a small Pakistani village near the Afghan border, before first volunteering to fight Indian forces controlling areas of disputed Kashmir. He signed up with little ado at Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s then legal recruitment office in Peshawar, about 80 miles northeast of Bannu. There, the group’s recruiters questioned him during several days of interviews before sending him off to basic training in Mansehra, according to court documents detailing Lindh’s own admissions to federal investigators. It was a routine procedure for thousands of Mujahedin volunteers both foreign and native.

That started his affiliation with Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which emerged as a force in the Kashmir insurgency in 1994 and quickly grew to become one of the largest and most feared of Pakistan’s many militant organizations. By 1997, the group had earned a ranking on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations and taken on an especially dark reputation for its alleged involvement in several bloody kidnappings, including the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in the early weeks of 2002. In that case, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen is believed to be involved along with another militant group named Jaish-e-Mohammed, or “Army of Mohammed.”

Throughout the late 1990s, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen worked closely with the Taliban, according to Talha, Hamid and others in the group, as well as Taliban documents recovered in Kabul after the Taliban lost power. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and its sympathizers effectively ran an underground jihadi railroad that stretched from Kabul and Kandahar to Shrinagar, the city in Indian Kashmir used by militants from Pakistan as the main staging ground for their Islamic insurgency against New Delhi. Harkat militants and holy war volunteers from sister organizations like Jaish-e-Mohammed traveled a network of madrassas and training camps that stretched through India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the group’s work with the Taliban at times overlapped with terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden, who of course Lindh would eventually meet.

Talha, whose splotchy black beard seemed to be falling off rather than growing in, remembered Lindh fondly as we sat last spring in a cramped Mansehra guesthouse near the camp, which was closed by Pakistani authorities after Sept. 11. “Our instructor introduced [Lindh] on his third day at lunch,” he said. Thumbing grimy pink plastic prayer beads, Talha at times sounded wistful as he spoke about Lindh.

“When we were sitting at lunch or dinner we would all try to sit next to him,” Talha said, describing how the light-skinned American drew the curiosity of his fellow jihadis.

When Lindh first arrived in Mansehra, about 400 young Harkat-ul-Mujahideen volunteers like Talha were already undergoing physical training as well as combat lessons and religious instruction at the group’s camp just outside town, where several other militant organizations ran similar operations with support from the Pakistani military.

Talha and other Harkat-ul-Mujahideen trainees in Mansehra at the time said they liked Lindh, though he struck them as odd. Lindh was the lone foreigner among the militants in that particular Harkat-ul-Mujahideen class; the rest of the volunteers in training at the time were Pakistani. Lindh could only talk to other trainees with the help of an instructor who spoke English as well as Urdu and Pashto. What struck them as particularly odd, however, were Lindh’s expressions of empathy for the Kashmir cause.

“One evening in the camp we were sitting with our brothers from Indian-held Kashmir,” said Talha. “They were telling us the problems they faced there,” Talha said. “One said his brother was killed by the Indian army. Another told how his sister was raped. As they told their stories, the man who cried the most was Abdul Hamid.”

The refugee group session that night was but one part of a training regimen lasting 24 days. The course was meant to ready would-be holy warriors both psychologically and physically for bloodletting in Indian Kashmir, where Muslim guerrilla fighters from Pakistan have helped wage an insurgency against the largely Hindu forces of India for the past 12 years, at the cost of an estimated 35,000 lives.

On a typical training day, according to Talha and other classmates, Lindh and his fellow recruits awoke before dawn to gather at the camp mosque, where they opened their Qurans and recited verses until the first of the day’s five calls to prayer sounded. After morning worship, the instructors put recruits through two hours of physical training that involved running and calisthenics. Then came breakfast, eaten quickly before arms lessons taught by mujahedin tutors, who schooled trainees in the use of pistols, Kalashnikovs, explosives and guerrilla tactics.

“We taught assembling and breaking down weapons,” said camp instructor Hamid (also an alias), a beefy man in his late 20s. “We also taught weapons techniques,” said Hamid. Peering over tiny square glasses with a smoky tint, Hamid said that the group had remained inactive since the police crackdown in 2001.

“In the same class, we taught how to handle weapons and how to fire as well as guerrilla warfare skills,” said Hamid. “We only train in small arms. We also taught night fighting skills and ambush strategy.”

In the afternoon, the students sat for academics, studying Islamic history and law. The classroom sessions lasted until late in the day, when students were given two hours of free time. After that, trainees gathered again at the mosque for an informal meeting ahead of dinner, which ended shortly before the call to evening prayer.

To close each day the volunteers all gathered at night for what they called an “accountability session,” in which the instructors encouraged trainees to air grievances they had with their colleagues, and to resolve issues or conflicts that arose in the ranks.

“We didn’t allow anyone in the camp to abuse or have a quarrel with someone else,” Hamid said. “If someone has a complaint about another volunteer, he stands up and voices it in front of the group. Suleyman [Lindh] never complained about anyone, and no one complained about Suleyman.”

Although Lindh seemed to have won loyalty and friendship among most of the volunteers, he failed to earn respect as a soldier from his instructors, who frequently found him struggling to keep up.

Talha remembered Lindh being late for many workouts.

“When we had physical training, those who came late were punished by the instructor,” Talha said, describing how tardy trainees were ordered either to do pushups or crawl long lengths, combat-style, wriggling over rocky ground on stomach and elbows.

“[Lindh] liked the punishment,” Talha said with a wincing smile.

Most of the volunteers at the camp who completed the basic training either went on to advanced guerrilla instruction at another one of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s many camps or formed small bands that slipped into Kashmir, roughly 10 miles from Mansehra. Some volunteers, either unwilling or unqualified for fighting or more training, simply drifted back to regular life, which in most cases meant more studying at madrassas like the one Lindh attended.

But none of those paths appealed to Lindh, who at some point apparently grew disenchanted with the conflicted politics of the Kashmir insurgency and saw the Taliban’s Afghanistan as a more righteous spiritual calling. That was fine with Lindh’s Pakistani instructors, who deemed him too weak and unskilled for their purposes anyway.

“We have a procedure for advanced guerrilla training,” Hamid said. “We send only handpicked volunteers for that training, and Sulayman didn’t qualify. We chose the stronger volunteers. Most of them are from hilly areas. Sulayman was from an American city. He was soft. We pick volunteers with a lot of strength and endurance. Sulayman was not fit enough.”

The Mansehra course nonetheless gave Lindh enough training to be considered for grunt duty in Afghanistan, where much of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen’s work was meant to aid the Taliban in its long-running war against the Northern Alliance.

“We train volunteers in the most basic skills they need in Afghanistan,” Hamid said. “One doesn’t need advanced guerrilla training to go to Afghanistan because the war there is not so difficult. The enemy is in front of you and you’re shooting at him. But war in Kashmir is the most difficult. You need advanced training to fight there. You face the enemy on all sides in Kashmir.”

Shortly after Lindh’s Mansehra training ended, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen instructors handed him over to the Taliban, sending him across the border and onto Kabul with a letter of introduction.

“We sent him to our Peshawar office and they arranged his trip to Afghanistan,” Hamid said.

Talha and others were sad to see Lindh go when he left Mansehra at the end of May 2001.

“We didn’t want him to go to Afghanistan,” Talha said. “He said he had seen the mujahedin and that he wanted to go to Afghanistan to see the Islamic environment.

“He said he was not going there to fight,” Talha added. “He was just there to see the Islamic environment.”

What exactly Lindh did when he joined the Taliban is somewhat in dispute, and will not be aired in court, since a plea bargain made a trial unnecessary. But when he left Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lindh was headed straight into the last and most controversial part of his trip through Central Asia. He would be with the Taliban for roughly six months before he was finally captured by U.S. forces Dec. 1, 2001.

Living in a tent, Lindh joined about 100 Arab volunteers at the camp, which sat on a hidden canyon floor in a chain of low mountains arching across the desert plain surrounding Kandahar. Instructors woke recruits early and ran them through a daily regimen of running, hiking and arms training, broken up by prayers. The trainees had target practice and learned how to handle grenades and Molotov cocktails. They went on camping excursions and learned battlefield tactics such as different types of combat crawls, surveillance methods, camouflage techniques, signs and signals, navigation of rugged terrain and how to carry weapons properly.

The trainees gathered together in the evenings at the camp mosque. But instead of accountability sessions, al Farooq offered guest speakers every night. Among the lecturers who addressed the group was Osama bin Laden, who showed up at the camp a handful of times toward the end of Lindh’s course.

The evening lectures had always been a chance for Lindh and other recruits, who sagged at the end of a day’s training, to nod off. Sitting through a bin Laden lecture required a special kind of endurance. Bin Laden, apparently ill, spoke softly and slowly as he sipped water during his talks, which covered topics ranging from local problems to global politics. Lindh dozed through at least one of bin Laden’s lectures, and found the others unmemorable, despite bin Laden’s obvious stature in the camp.

Lindh also had heard rumors that bin Laden masterminded the embassy attacks in East Africa, and he knew that the wealthy Saudi had worked with Azzam and supported jihadi causes. But he had also heard that bin Laden thought jihadi struggles like Chechnya and Bosnia were a lost cause, leaving Lindh uncertain of what to make of him. Also, Lindh disdained how some in the camp looked with reverence to bin Laden, who was always accompanied by an unusually large entourage. Lindh felt jihad was not a celebrity cause, and that bin Laden’s apparent stardom did not mesh with the egalitarian ideals of Islam.

Each time after bin Laden spoke, recruits who wanted to meet him would line up for a handshake. Lindh passed on the first evening, as did some of the other trainees, and went back to his tent to sleep. On one of bin Laden’s other visits, however, recruits were told at the end of bin Laden’s talk that they could either meet the famed Saudi exile, or do camp chores after the mosque session. Some of the camp instructors had told Lindh beforehand that anyone who wanted to meet bin Laden had to be sincere about jihad, since many in the camp seemed ready to drop out. Lindh was indeed serious about jihad — and wanted to get out of work detail — so he joined four other trainees, with whom bin Laden spent about five minutes, thanking each for volunteering.

The meeting seemed insignificant to Lindh at the time, an excuse to avoid unpleasant camp duty. He didn’t know the United States already wanted the terrorist leader for mass murder, or that in those very days bin Laden was orchestrating the death of thousands more in New York. He walked away thinking little of the encounter, eager only to be done with training so he could finally go on duty with the Taliban.

But toward the end of the course, an al Farooq instructor approached Lindh and others to ask if anyone would be interested in taking up jihad in either Israel or the United States.

Lindh and his comrades thought the offer was a trick question, an effort by the Arabs who ran the camp to ferret out spies rumored to be among them. But the recruitment was likely for real.

One of the ranking al Farooq trainers, Abu Mohammad al-Misri, an Egyptian also known as “Shaleh,” had been named in a federal indictment for his alleged participation in the 1998 embassy bombings. Again, Lindh knew nothing of him. Regardless, he turned down the offer to leave Afghanistan, saying again that he had come to help the Taliban. Lindh left the camp in June or July at the end of his training, and soon joined a group of about 30 other Ansar volunteers headed north to fight Northern Alliance forces, who were then clinging to a tiny corner of Afghanistan in a losing war.

Lindh arrived on the front lines in the war’s eleventh hour. His group flew in on one of the last troop lifts from Kabul to Konduz on about Sept. 6, 2001. In Konduz, Lindh was given a Kalashnikov and two grenades, a vest with pockets for his ammunition, and some warmer clothes since winter was already coming in the mountains. A Taliban commander told Lindh and the others in the group that they were officially members of the Afghan army, even though there was not an Afghan among them. With that, Lindh saw himself as a sworn servant to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a soldier not a terrorist — a distinction that would come to mean little, if anything, in the eyes of most Americans.

Lindh’s unit was then sent toward the front lines in Takhar, where the group was ordered to take up defensive positions on two hills opposite Northern Alliance forces. Lindh was told his group would make no attacks; their mission was simply to hold the hills, essentially guard duty at a position that weathered only the occasional volley of Northern Alliance mortar fire. His long-anticipated jihad consisted of touring a remote corner of the front line where the Northern Alliance forces were so far away that the Taliban rarely, if ever, saw them. Lindh never managed to squeeze off a shot across the front lines, and his unit suffered no casualties while protecting the lonely hills. He mostly read and eyed the empty landscape, rotating with others in two-week shifts in and out of foxholes.

Word of what happened on Sept. 11 spread by word of mouth from others in his unit who listened to radio broadcasts. With no access to a radio himself, much less a television or newspaper, he was unsure what to think of the attacks and the speculation that bin Laden was behind them. In any case, Lindh saw bin Laden and any conflict he had with America as separate from the Taliban’s fight against the Northern Alliance. He was tragically wrong in many ways.

Eventually Lindh and others began to suspect that bin Laden was indeed behind the attacks, a troubling revelation for some on the remote front. The moral, ethical and religious reasoning that had drawn Lindh and many of his jihadi comrades to fight in trenches against fellow Islamic believers in Afghanistan did not call for the attacks like those unleashed on Sept. 11. And whatever misconceptions Lindh had about bin Laden, one thing was clear: the Taliban supported him. Many of the foreign fighters in the trenches alongside Lindh began to question the Taliban and its support of bin Laden as sketchy details about the thousands of civilian casualties reached them in their lonely post.

Some considered defecting, looking for ways to flee Takhar. But U.S. airstrikes, which had begun on Oct. 7, had frozen all transportation to and from the area. Slipping away on foot seemed out of the question. A walk back to the nearest town of any size, Konduz, would take more than two days over frigid steppe supposedly roamed by bandits. There seemed to be no way out, so Lindh never really considered abandoning his position. But eventually he and his colleagues were forced to, as the airstrikes were breaking up Taliban positions elsewhere along the front, and Lindh’s unit was ordered to fall back.

By mid-November, they moved from their positions and the entire front line folded; all the Taliban in the area broke into a full retreat toward Konduz. By the time they reached it, the town was controlled by the Northern Alliance and the Taliban soon accepted defeat — at least officially — and entered into surrender talks.

Around November 24, Lindh and several hundred other foreign fighters were ordered by Afghan Taliban commanders to turn themselves over to the Northern Alliance soon after they arrived in Konduz. Lindh and others were told by a Taliban commander that they would be let go after being disarmed. Whether the Taliban commander believed that or not, Northern Alliance Gen. Rashid Dostum had no plans to free any of the surrendering foreigners. Instead, Dostum’s men trucked them to his fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif called Qala-i-Jangi. There Northern Alliance troops crowded Lindh and roughly 400 other captives into a basement for overnight keeping ahead of interrogations. The packed cellar was a din of fighters speaking in no fewer than half a dozen languages echoing off the cement walls. Lindh crouched on the dirt floor near a corner used as a toilet because there was no room to lie down anywhere else.

Lindh’s brief time as an armed Taliban fighter was over. But he would not escape the brutalities of war.

As the sun rose on the chilly morning of November 25, Northern Alliance guards descended to the basement to begin bringing up the prisoners for interrogation. At about 10 a.m., after some 200 prisoners had left the basement without incident, Lindh too mounted the double plank of metal stairs leading from the cellar. At one point, as Lindh sat motionless, one of Dostum’s guards struck him in the head, leaving him dazed as he watched two men who appeared to be Americans question prisoners one by one.

Lindh thought the two Americans were somehow under the command of Dostum, renowned among Taliban for his brutality, because Afghan guards aided them and took orders from them. It seemed to Lindh that the two Americans must have seen the guards beating the prisoners randomly, but neither appeared concerned. Lindh began to fear that if identified as an American he would be separated from the group and kept behind in Dostum’s custody for further questioning. Lindh dreaded the idea of remaining in Qala-i-Jangi, where he expected to be tortured and killed by Dostum’s men.

The Americans Lindh saw were CIA operatives Mike Spann and Dave Tyson. During the early interrogations, an Iraqi prisoner had told Spann that there was an Irishman among the prisoners. Spann noticed Lindh in the group and was told the disheveled fighter, whose skin was lighter than most, had been overheard speaking English. Lindh also drew the attention of an Afghan camera man, who began videotaping Lindh, providing an eerie record of one of the most compelling moments of the war — two Americans face to face in a remote corner of Afghanistan, each there for reasons of conviction, yet on opposite sides of battle lines.

“Hey, you, right here with your head down,” Spann called to Lindh as he sat limply among the other prisoners.

“Look at me; I know you speak English,” Spann said, eyeing Lindh as he sat unresponsive. “Look at me. Where did you get the British military sweater?”

Northern Alliance guards hauled Lindh to his feet and shoved him over to a blanket spread over the dirt, where he kneeled and sagged his head, letting his long brown hair fall over his face.

“Where are you from?” Spann said. “You believe in what you’re doing here that much, you’re willing to be killed here? How were you recruited to come here? Who brought you here? Hey!”

Spann snapped twice in the prisoner’s face but still got no response.

Spann matched Lindh’s silence for a moment, looking him over in a long pause as a distant autumn sun rose and warmed the chill morning air. Square-jawed with a neatly trimmed mustache, Spann was built like a brick house. The brawn in his chest and shoulders showed through even the heavy fleece he wore with his jeans. Lindh by this point looked like a wasted waif.

Lindh glowered and hunched angrily until a nearby Afghan guard reached over, pulled his hair back and held his head up for Spann’s digital camera. The expression of defiance and angered humiliation Lindh wore Spann had undoubtedly seen on the others he had already questioned.

“You got to talk to me,” Spann said. “All I want to do is talk to you and find out what your story is. I know you speak English.”

Lindh said nothing, and Spann clearly displayed frustration when Tyson walked over.

“He won’t talk to me,” Spann said. “Well, he’s a Muslim, you know,” Tyson said, lowering his voice for a moment to talk quietly with Spann before going on to speak loudly enough so Lindh was sure to hear.

“The problem is he needs to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here,” Tyson said. “We’re just going to leave him, and he’s going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life. It’s his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys. If they don’t talk to us, we can’t …”

Spann suddenly turned to address Lindh. “Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists, and killed other Muslims?” he said. “There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Koran teaches? I don’t think so. Are you going to talk to us?”

“That’s all right, man,” Tyson said. “Gotta give him a chance, he got his chance.”

Indeed, Lindh had his chance, but he wasn’t taking it with Americans. Foolishly, he still hoped that somehow the group would be freed, and allowed to leave the fortress peacefully after the interrogations.

Spann still had no idea Lindh was an American as a guard pulled Lindh to his feet and shoved him to an area with the other previously interrogated prisoners. And he didn’t live long enough to find out what the rest of the world would soon know.

About half an hour later, as alliance guards called into the cellar for another prisoner, as many as half a dozen, mostly Uzbeks, suddenly rounded the steps, tossing grenades, yelling, “Allah u Akbar!” The guards fired into the crush of prisoners charging up the stairs but were soon overpowered as more men leapt up behind them and fought toward the outside door.

It was the beginning of an uprising.

Seated by the side of the building, Lindh heard the sound of shots and screams and rose to his feet as some of the prisoners around him began shouting and untying each other. He turned to run but was shot in the leg as alliance fighters standing on the roof of the building fired Kalashnikovs down into the yard, spraying the scattering prisoners. Elsewhere in the yard Spann had gone down under a crush of prisoners who rushed him, becoming the first U.S. casualty in America’s war against the Taliban.

As the gunfire of the revolt quickened, Lindh lay bleeding, motionless where he fell, watching the bloody scene unfold. He and another wounded prisoner lay in the yard playing dead for the duration of the 14-hour shootout.

At nightfall, as the battle wore on, Lindh’s Taliban comrades dragged him back into the basement, where he remained for nearly a week with holdouts from the revolt until the Northern Alliance finally forced them to surrender. When Lindh emerged from the basement again he was among 86 of the surviving 400 Taliban, whom the Northern Alliance brought to Dostum’s personal home outside Mazar-e-Sharif.

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Twelve Green Berets, two Air Force bomb guiders and three CIA operatives, including Spann, had been traveling with Dostum since October, when they were assigned to help his faction of the Northern Alliance as part of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Author Robert Young Pelton had joined Dostum’s entourage during the uprising at Qala-i-Jangi, having arranged to take a small CNN crew with him on a monthlong assignment profiling the warlord for National Geographic Adventure magazine. Pelton had quickly become friends with many of the Green Berets, who recognized him from his books and television show.

Pelton and the Green Berets were watching television at Dostum’s house the night of Dec. 1 when they heard a loud bang at the gates. The group went out to find Dostum’s men unloading dozens of wounded from two trucks and lining the prisoners up in a gloom of swirling dust aglow with headlights. Earlier Pelton had asked Dostum’s men to show him any prisoners taken from the basement so he could interview them. Dostum’s men had obliged, bringing all 86 men from the basement to Pelton. Like others, Pelton had heard that perhaps a handful of men remained in the basement and was stunned to see so many survivors. Many of the prisoners were barely alive and wailed in pain as Dostum’s men pulled them off the trucks while Pelton and the Green Berets looked on.

Pelton took some pictures while the Green Berets urged him to be careful and stay back. Initially Pelton didn’t notice Lindh, and after several minutes of photographing the group, he urged Dostum’s men to take them to the hospital.

At the hospital, Lindh was unable to stand and had to be carried by stretcher into the makeshift emergency ward, where he was placed on the floor with the other wounded from the basement, all of them near death. One of Dostum’s personal cameramen had gone to the hospital and was taping the scene, turning his camera on the wounded one by one as the doctors asked each individual his name and nationality. Lindh wearily said he was American when the doctor came to him. Stunned, the cameraman ran from the ward back to the palace to tell Pelton.

Several Green Berets, including a medic, went with Pelton to the hospital, where Pelton interviewed Lindh for CNN, made sure the boy got badly needed medical care and offered to help him get in touch with his family.

“And did you enjoy the jihad?” Pelton asked Lindh. “I mean, was it a good cause for you?”

“Definitely,” Lindh said.

After the interview the Green Berets took Lindh back to Dostum’s house, where Lindh slept as Pelton’s interview began to air on CNN Dec. 2. John Walker Lindh became a household name.

The Green Berets woke Lindh up early the next morning, bound his arms and blindfolded him. A three-car convoy set out from Dostum’s house back to Mazar-e-Sharif, where Lindh was taken to the main coalition base in the area, an unused high school where military officials interrogated him over the course of several days. He talked and talked, urged on by his interrogators who told him that anything he knew might be able to save American lives.

Some of the soldiers who had to deal with Lindh grew disgusted after learning where he had been and what he had done. His guards in particular began to show open disdain, along with traces of fear. They frequently called him “shit bag” and “terrorist,” as well as “shithead” — the nickname that stuck.

At some point during those initial days of questioning, which lasted from Dec. 2 to Dec. 7, it struck Lindh that he might need a lawyer, and he asked his military keepers when he could seek an attorney. But the officers on hand neither had an answer for him nor seemed overly concerned with Lindh’s request. They wanted battlefield information that might be of use to the ongoing conflict, not evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Orders had come from the Pentagon that Lindh was to be questioned about military, not criminal, matters. The FBI, U.S. officials decided, would ask any questions about possible law violations later.

On Dec. 7, military officials planned to fly Lindh to Camp Rhino, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan outside Kandahar. In preparation for the journey, U.S. troops bound and blindfolded Lindh, tying his hands tightly together with plastic cuffs. On Lindh’s blindfold U.S. troops scrawled “shithead,” and they taunted him as they took turns posing for snapshots next to their infamous prisoner.

One soldier told Lindh he was “going to hang” for his crimes and that upon his death the soldier would sell the souvenir “shithead” blindfold snapshots and give the money to a Christian charity. Another soldier told Lindh that he’d like to shoot him then and there. But instead, they marched him from his quarters, shoved him into the back of a van, and drove him to the Mazar-e-Sharif airport. There, they hustled Lindh onto a cargo plane.

Onboard, the plastic cuffs dug into Lindh’s wrists, sending sharp pains through his arms. At some point during the flight Lindh began to beg the unseen troops around him to loosen the ties, screaming to be heard over the engine noise of the plane. But Lindh’s guards simply told him the cuffs weren’t meant for comfort. And then Lindh began to grow scared.

“Please don’t kill me,” he pleaded, speaking blindly to the soldiers around him.

“Shut up,” someone near said.

It was night when the plane touched down at Camp Rhino, about 70 miles south of Kandahar. Lindh’s guards initially put him face down on a stretcher, and he thought for a moment that he might be en route to his execution. The frigid winter air in the high desert darkness swept cold over Lindh as the Marines unloaded him from the plane.

“Please don’t kill me,” Lindh begged again.

“Shut the fuck up,” one of the Marines nearby said.

Lindh’s guards cut off the clothes he had been given in Mazar-e-Sharif, leaving him naked as they bound him to a stretcher with duct tape wrapped tightly around his chest, upper arms and ankles. Troops at Camp Rhino took more pictures of Lindh as he lay naked, taped to the stretcher, blindfolded in pain and fear. Then they placed him in yet another metal shipping container, where Marines questioned him for roughly 45 minutes before leaving him to lay shivering alone, crying. After some time, guards returned to wrap him in blankets, but left him bound so tightly that his forearms were pinned together in front of him, pointing down. The Marines kept him like that for two days, inside his windowless compartment, unknowing of when day and night passed. Small holes in the sides of the container provided the only source of air and light, through which troops yelled swearing insults and loudly discussed how they planned to spit in his food. When Lindh needed to urinate, his guards simply propped up his stretcher vertically, leaving him bound.

Lindh began Dec. 9 cold and hungry. He was given a meal with pork, which he refused to eat. His guards then gave him another meal and a new blanket. Shortly thereafter, Marine guards entered Lindh’s container, tore off the duct tape, dressed him in a hospital gown and shackles and then carried him on his stretcher, still blindfolded, to a nearby tent. When guards removed the blindfold, Lindh sat facing Federal Bureau of Investigation Agent Christopher Reimann, who introduced himself and then immediately read Lindh his rights. When Reimann came to the point related to one’s right to an attorney, he said, “Of course, there are no lawyers here.”

Reimann questioned Lindh in three lengthy interrogation sessions over the course of two days after Lindh waived his Miranda rights both verbally and in writing. After questioning, Lindh was allowed to wear clothes again and was no longer taped to furniture inside his box, but Reimann’s interrogations were shaping up as something bad for Lindh nonetheless.

On Dec. 14, a helicopter flew Lindh from Camp Rhino to the USS Peleliu, a warship afloat about 15 miles off the coast of Pakistan, where he would remain for 17 days before being transferred to the USS Bataan. In mid-January of 2002, as Lindh sat jailed in the belly of a U.S. warship at sea, the government filed an affidavit and obtained an arrest warrant for him, clearing the way for a civilian trial in the United States. Last October, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, after pleading guilty to aiding the Taliban and carrying explosives. With time off for good behavior, he will still need to serve 17 years.

But on Sept. 23, 1998, Lindh wrote a telling note home in which he doubted the involvement of Islamic militants in the recent bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa. To Lindh, the bombings seemed “far more likely to have been carried out by the American government than by any Muslims.” In a later e-mail, Lindh wrote his mother, half-jokingly, that she should move to England: “I really don’t understand what you’re [sic] big attachment to America is all about. What has America ever done for anybody?” In yet another e-mail, he expressed his view that the United States had sparked the Gulf War. Lindh believed that an American official had “heavily encouraged” Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait.

Lindh studied in Yemen for nearly a year when his visa ran out and he returned to Marin County. Reluctantly, he stayed with his family for about nine months, but the sunny, privileged life Lindh had grown up knowing in the Bay Area left him uncomfortable spiritually and unsatisfied academically, and he returned to Yemen in the early part of 2000 and spent much of the year studying. That fall, his visa was expired again. Pakistani missionaries Lindh had met back in California had made the informal, unregulated religious schools there, the madrassas, sound appealing. Soon, he was on his way.

The September 2000 trip to Islamabad would prove the pivotal move for Lindh. His studies of — and passion for — Islam would deepen. He would make the remarkable transition from a dedicated student of the Koran to a jihadi traversing Afghanistan with a ragtag group of militants. And little more than a year later, he would find himself carrying arms for the Taliban in a conflict that ultimately set him against U.S. forces.

This key chapter, for the most part, began at a madrassa run by Mufti Mohammed Iltimas Khan, who served as the self-appointed headmaster at his tiny religious school in Bannu, a desert town not far from Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Like most madrassas, Iltimas’s is Spartan and remote. From a dusty alley, two dented metal doors painted blue open into the school, which at first glance appears still under construction. Inside, it’s little better. Iltimas’s study, where Lindh sometimes slept, is bare except for a corner table holding the madrassa’s only phone, a locked book cupboard mounted on the wall and a set of shelves standing over the suitcase of personal items Lindh left behind.

Iltimas and I sat on the floor of the study in the spring of 2002 talking and drinking tea with buffalo milk as the sound of boys chanting Koranic verses hummed through walls thickened with layer over layer of white paint hopelessly grimed by desert dust. Occasionally one of the younger boys would peel into long, high wails above the others for a few verses, carrying the chorus of chants sharply into the mosque’s courtyard.

Not long before, Lindh had been among them. From here, Lindh managed to study, but also remain in touch with his family and friends in San Francisco by sending email at the Internet clubs in Bannu. On Dec. 3, 2000, he dropped his mother a note making fun of the recently elected President George W. Bush, calling him “your new president.” And, he added, “I’m glad he’s not mine.”

In later notes home, Lindh expressed an increasingly dimmer view of the United States and the West. On Feb. 8, 2001, he wrote to his mother saying, “I don’t really want to see America again.”

Iltimas’s madrassa houses roughly 40 boys aged 10 to 17 whose core studying — which begins well before dawn and went to sunset — revolves around memorization of the Koran. Lindh would sit rigid during his lessons, moving only his mouth as he recited. Iltimas urged Lindh to loosen up, and he did, somewhat, occasionally rocking stiffly in tiny sways that appeared hardly noticeable alongside the near gymnastic readings of some of his schoolmates.

As the only foreign student, Lindh took on a celebrity status of sorts, spending much more time with Iltimas than any of the other pupils.

“He was our guest student,” Iltimas said of Lindh, whom he remembers fondly. “I used to ask questions about America, what type of civilization Americans have. I was far away from America, and he was near to us and near to them.”

“One day he told me about his parents separation, I asked him, do they live together? After that he explained.” Presumably, Lindh explained his parents’ divorce, and that his father had announced he was gay. But Iltimas would only say that what Lindh told him was strictly “a secret for me.”

Lindh’s mother urged him to come home for a visit. But Lindh wrote on March 1, 2001, that he was “busy in my studies and I have no intention of interrupting them for any reason in the near future. … I wasted about 9 months in America in which I achieved nothing and forgot much of what I had learned while in Yemen.”

As he seemed to be quickly advancing in his studies, Lindh began to have vague ideas for future plans. He expressed his ultimate hope to become an Islamic teacher in America after furthering his education in Pakistan. And he talked of how he hoped to enjoy female companionship.

“He asked me the second or the third night if I were alone here,” Iltimas recalled laughingly, baring teeth stained by countless cups of tea and squirming with an adolescent’s giddy embarrassment at talk of girls. “I told him yes, I am unmarried. I asked him, Suleyman, how many marriages will you have? He told me four!” Four wives is the maximum number allowed for Muslims, Iltimas explains.

During one of their many hours of conversation, Lindh also told Iltimas how, after converting to Islam he began to feel uncomfortable living in the United States and became naturally drawn to Islamic countries, where his adopted faith played a part in everyday society. Lindh told Iltimas that he felt as though he could neither explore his newfound religion deeply nor live by the commands of Islamic scripture properly in his native country, where he saw many societal ills.

“He was fed up with American society,” Iltimas said. “He was searching for a place where people follow and obey all the commands of Allah. America was not suitable for this.”

Lindh also voiced his disenchantment with certain Islamic societies.

“He didn’t like the present setup of Muslim governments,” Iltimas said. “He used to say Muslim governments were in the hands of the West and America. He wanted an Islam like it was in its earliest days, free of influence by America and other outside powers.”

Which is what appealed to Lindh about the Taliban, and Afghanistan. Iltimas smiled as he remembered the Radio Shariat broadcasts he would translate for Lindh. Before the Taliban lost power late in 2001, Radio Shariat broadcast readings of the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law, which included decrees outlawing, among other things, all forms of art, which the Taliban saw as idolatry. The Taliban ideologues viewed virtually every element of human behavior as subject to stringent Islamic laws, which they twisted into perversions religiously unrecognizable to Muslims outside the radical school of fundamentalism taught in scores of madrassas by the likes of Iltimas.

“They were true Muslims,” Iltimas said wistfully of the Taliban, a movement whose ranks had been flush from the earliest days beginning in 1994 with vigilante students educated in Pakistani madrassas. He said those who questioned the Taliban’s brand of Islamic governance, the harshest ever seen in the history of Islam, were either misguided Muslims or Western demagogues bent on subverting Afghanistan and the wider Islamic world — an argument the Taliban itself sounded throughout its rule.

Iltimas said Lindh’s curiosity about Afghanistan initially seemed like a passing interest. But it grew. Soon, Lindh became convinced that the Taliban’s Afghanistan embodied Islamic society in its purest form, a modern representation of the era of the prophet that began on the Arabian Peninsula in 610 A.D. with Mohammad’s revelations near Mecca. The Taliban itself claimed they were shaping a society as such — a pure Islamic state to lead the rest of the Muslim world, which they saw as adrift in Western corruption. Lindh began to act out some of the Taliban’s creeds, showing scorn for art that was legal in Pakistan but banned just across the border. He scratched off pictures on the pads he used to jot down notes about Islamic histories, Arabic translations or Pashto vocabulary. One notebook Lindh left behind with Iltimas had an image of a galloping herd of horses on its cover. Lindh had blackened out the faces of the horses with a marker and tore at the bodies with deep, looping scratches of a pen.

An entry in his notebook also showed he grew interested in the battles between the Muslim Pakistanis and Indian Hindus in Kashmir. At the top of the page, Lindh wrote “Kashmir” in block letters, numbering seven points below, each one a war statistic he had taken from Islamic fundamentalist literature widely available in Pakistan. By Lindh’s count, in the years spanning 1991 to 1999 some “60,000 Kashmiris have been killed” with another “26,000 wounded.” He was convinced there were “461 school children burned alive” in the same period and that “700 women between ages of 7 and 70 have been raped.” Still more, Lindh cited “39,000 disabled for life” and another “97,000 missing” with “47,000 forced from their homes.”

The figures Lindh read about Kashmir were just some of the widely printed stories that appear daily in Pakistan’s press, which has many English newspapers of dubious veracity that readily air propaganda about the issue. All the articles telling of tragedies in Kashmir, as well as the things Lindh heard word of mouth from Pakistanis, began to weigh more heavily on his mind.

Kashmir was just a day’s drive. The idea of Muslims suffering so close roused Lindh, who began to wonder aloud why more Muslims were not coming to the aid of the Kashmiris, a religious duty clearly spelled out in the teachings of his favorite Islamic writer and scholar, slain Muslim holy warrior Shaykh Abdullah Azzam. In Azzam’s time, Afghanistan had offered the most valiant cause for jihad, and indeed thousands of Muslims, including Americans, answered the call. Uncounted scores of American jihadis traveled to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, a war effort financially backed by the Reagan administration.

The trend continued through the 1990s, though Afghanistan became but one of several other destinations for jihadis. Figures are sketchy, since U.S. authorities do not track the overseas travels of American citizens. But terrorism experts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have estimated that up to 2,000 Muslim Americans left the United States during the 1990s to fight in places like Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kashmir. In Pakistan, authorities put the number of Americans jihadis who are believed to have trained in either Pakistan or Afghanistan since 1989 at around 400.

Followers of Azzam’s brand of radically conservative Islam believed armed jihad, fighting in defense of their perceived oppression of Muslim lands and people, to be the requisite obligation of any able-bodied Muslim. In conversations with Lindh, Iltimas agreed in principle with Azzam’s teachings, that Muslims were obligated to go on jihad if able to the nearest Muslims in need. Lindh began to wonder, then, what everyone was doing sitting around in Bannu. Why had Iltimas not gone to aid the Muslims in Kashmir?

“I’m not a warrior, I’m a teacher,” Iltimas said.

Eventually, Lindh told Iltimas that he wanted to take a leave from his studies and escape, he claimed, to the North and its cooler climes to avoid Bannu’s summer heat. Iltimas discussed the idea with Khizar Hayat, an Islamic missionary Lindh had met in San Francisco who had become Lindh’s best friend in Pakistan. The mufti agreed to let Lindh go in May on a trip with Hayat. In what looks like Lindh’s last e-mail home, he wrote to his mother in April 27, 2001, that he was going to “some cold mountainous region.”

Lindh hardly packed anything. He took only a backpack and sleeping bag with him the day he left, leaving a full suitcase and his burgeoning library of books on Islam for safekeeping. Lindh didn’t say when he’d be back.

“You’re leaving but your things are still here, when will you return?” Iltimas recalled saying to Lindh in the doorway of the study as they said goodbye. Lindh shrugged and smiled but did not answer. He thought at the time that he might be gone for a couple of months before coming back to Bannu to pick up his things before returning to California to visit his family. He thought he would probably be back in the United States by Christmas 2001.

It was the last time Iltimas would speak to Lindh.

Lindh and Hayat traveled from Bannu to Peshawar, where they stayed for a few days with Hayat’s uncle before Lindh left on his own, with little explanation, according to Hayat. Lindh had left behind a sleeping bag and a few other belongings, winnowing his possessions further still. Hayat said he returned to Bannu angry with Lindh.

“I showed him all of Pakistan,” Hayat said. “When he left us, I left him.”

Iltimas was also upset about Lindh’s disappearance, especially after hearing from Lindh’s mother. Shortly after Lindh left, a letter from Marilyn Walker arrived at Iltimas’s madrassa. Postmarked July 2, 2001, the envelope was addressed to “Suleyman Lindh/Suleyman al Faris” care of Iltimas. Since Lindh was gone, Iltimas opened the note, which his mother began with “Dear Suleyman” and went on to beg him to call home “anytime of day until you reach me. Tuesdays and Thursdays after 2 PM (Pacific Standard Time) and weekends are best. Or, write and give me a way to reach you. I’ll be leaving for the Sundance July 28 and should be back August 13. I hope that we hear from you before then. I really need to hear your voice, John! So, please call ‘collect’ and tell me what’s up.”

Iltimas put the letter aside, thinking he would save it for Lindh whenever he returned. Nine days later another letter from Marilyn Walker arrived, this one addressed to Iltimas himself. Lindh’s mother told Iltimas that she had “lost touch with my son, Suleyman Lindh (Suleyman al Faris). The last I heard from him (via e-mail) was April 26th. He said that he might be moving into the mountains for a cooler climate during the summer months. Would you know where he is and how I may reach him or could you get a message to him to call home ‘collect’ or write?”

Lindh’s mother included her address and phone number in the note, as well as a copy of the missive in Urdu. Iltimas saw Hayat in the Bannu bazaar shortly thereafter and told him about the letters. Hayat told Iltimas that he had heard in the bazaar that Lindh had indeed made it north. Iltimas relayed this in a lengthy reply to Marilyn Walker dated July 27, 2001. Iltimas told Lindh’s mother how he got her letter a “few days back but unfortunately due to various reasons I could not reply in time. Sorry for the delay.

“John Lindh Lindh/ Suleyman Faris is no doubt your son, but rest assured that he is my student and also my younger brother. He is a very sweet, honest, Godfearing and a very decent human being … . rest assured Madam, whenever he contacts me, I will definitely convey your feelings to him.” Iltimas also wrote: “I will also, in my own way, start inquiries to know about his location and health. He is like a younger brother to me and will spare no efforts to know about his welfare.”

He did not tell her, however, what he strongly suspected: That her son had gone off to war, to fight with Muslim jihadis in Kashmir.

Lindh’s mother still had heard nothing from her son when she wrote Iltimas once more in a letter dated August 19, 2001, in which she thanked Iltimas “so much for responding to the letter regarding my son, Suleyman. I cannot tell you how much it means to me to know that he is cared for by so many in a land so far from home. I appreciate your concern for his well being and your offer to seek information about his whereabouts. We miss him very much. It isn’t like him to have gone so long without making contact with us. If you are able to make contact with Suleyman and he is able to phone home, please tell him to do so ‘collect.’” She signed off by giving her phone numbers and telling Iltimas to call her “any time with any news you may have about him.”

But Iltimas made little effort to find Lindh, despite his promise. Iltimas asked people at Bannu madrassas and mosques who had recently traveled if they had seen Lindh, but no one had. He made plans to go to Mansehra himself, but put them off initially to attend a month-long religious conference, and then canceled them altogether after Sept. 11. In any case, the mufti thought the matter rested with Hayat.

For his part, Hayat painted the picture of his relationship with Lindh as one of an Islamic missionary guiding a hopeful Muslim convert toward a similar path of peaceful proselytizing in the United States. To Hayat, Lindh was a lost missionary, though gone to a worthy alternative cause. Hayat denied playing any role turning Lindh toward jihad.

At the time, Hayat’s story seemed plausible, and he struck me as sincere, if laconic and temperamental. Except in one regard. He claimed to have no idea who, if not him and Iltimas, might have introduced Lindh to members of Harkat ul Mujaheddin, the Pakistani militant group that would give Lindh his first arms training. Hayat said Lindh met many people in Bannu, people Hayat didn’t know.

“He was meeting so many people, who knows who he was talking to?” Hayat said, speaking to me one afternoon as I sat with him at his father’s store in the bazaar, taking the same seat where Lindh would often studiously read his Koran.

Hayat’s complete unwillingness to name anyone among the people he saw Lindh talking with in the bazaar and at the Bannu mosques left me thinking that he either helped arrange Lindh’s initial enlistment with Harkat ul Mujaheddin or knew exactly who did. But Hayat remained unwavering in his account whenever I confronted him with doubts, saying I should take up any unanswered questions with the one person who knew all, Lindh himself.

“He’s alive, you can ask him,” Hayat said.

Like Hayat, Iltimas washed his hands completely of having anything to do with helping Lindh go on jihad. But he stopped well short of condemning Lindh for doing it.

For Iltimas and Hayat, Lindh’s two closest friends in Pakistan, there was no question. The Taliban and their Muslim brethren in Pakistan and India were righteous before God, and their missions were at least as worthy as any other Islamic undertaking — if not more so.

Part II: A meeting with bin Laden, and Lindh’s capture after a violent revolt

But only after a long week that saw a possible surrender come and go in what many think is al-Qaida’s last stand. It didn’t prevent al-Qaida from issuing a curious, ominous, handwritten plea to its Muslim brothers in the mujahedin opposition to stop fighting, and leave the combat to the Americans. And it was a week that started with a much closer look at the fighting than I’d anticipated, and than I’d been prepared for.

After it became clear that Tora Bora had emerged as the latest — and perhaps final — large battle on this war against al-Qaida, I had made my way from nearby Jalalabad, pressing my hired Tora Bora guide, local journalist Noor Rahman, to somehow get me and my teenage translator, Naveed Ahmad, past the mujahedin checkpoints that were stopping other journalists on the spiny road twisting through the dusty Tora Bora foothills, known as Meliva, and up to the front lines.

After some haggling, he did. And on Monday, Noor grinningly held my hand, as Afghan men commonly do, as we hiked up to mujahedin positions with about six Alliance soldiers, occasionally pausing to wait for Naveed, who had been vomiting with car sickness since we left Jalalabad that morning.

Atop the ridge, the mujahedin field commander in the area, Shah Lala, pointed into the distance toward a hilltop he said Al-Qaida fighters were holding. I couldn’t see anything and told him I wanted to go to the next ridge for a better view, eyeing him skeptically with thoughts that this front-line tour might be little more than a dog-and-pony show at a quiet backside guard post. That’s when the first mortar shell went up with a puff of smoke, from the area where we had just been looking. Shah Lala and other mujahedin told me to dive for cover.

I skidded about 10 feet down and crouched behind a huge rock with Naveed, who was pale and breathless but seemed much calmer than I was. The mujahedin and Noor rose from their cover nearby, along the backside of the slope, whooping and laughing, even as the dust from the blast was still hanging in the air. But Naveed and I stayed down on the advice of another reporter who’d come with us, who said mortars usually fell in threes and that more were probably on the way.

The second explosion hit the top of the rock where Naveed and I hid. It felt like someone had punched me in the back of my head and stomach at once as I closed my eyes against a spray of flying stones.

“Do you believe it’s the front line now?” said Naveed, rake-thin in a tattered sweater, with the shadow of his first mustache barely hanging on his upper lip. “They’re firing on us. Can we go?”

I muttered yes as we scrambled in a crouch back down the hill with our mujahedin escorts toward a waiting truck as the promised third mortar exploded somewhere behind us. Neither of us bothered to stop and see exactly where.

I was glad to be sitting as we drove away because my legs began to feel rubbery and numb as the giddy thrill of high fear faded and turned to shock. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing with the mujahedin, who mimicked my frightened expressions, shook my hand repeatedly and slugged me in the arm with big smiles of congratulations as though I had just undergone some sort of graduation.

“I’m not afraid of mortars, I’m afraid of you,” Shah Lala told me, saying a dead reporter was more of a problem for him than a dead mujahedin. Naveed was not amused, and each time I caught his eye that evening things seemed less funny until my thrill of fear gave way to a deep sense of guilt.

I had taken a sick 17-year-old boy, who was skipping school to work as a translator because his family needed the money, onto a battlefield where we came about 3 feet from being badly hurt or killed. Had the second mortar gone just a bit deeper, the shell would have landed at our feet instead of above our heads, shredding us.

Moreover, I had given myself better odds than Naveed by wearing a borrowed flak jacket. Naveed wore only his sweater, a threadbare light blue school uniform and a prayer cap, hardly enough to keep off the cold mountain air. He had confided to me that his mother had urged him not to take up my offer of a trip to Tora Bora and to stay in school, which had only reopened in Jalalabad in recent weeks. But his father told him the family could really use the money and sent him with me anyway.

“I’m an asshole,” I said later when telling the story to Aouidj Heidi, a chain-smoking French journalist whose world-weary airs and dark sense of humor have combined for welcome company.

“No, you’re not,” he said, assuring me that the translators, drivers and guides working for the international press corps reporting on the fighting at Tora Bora understood the risks. “We’re not covering Disney World.”

Talking after a dinner in Jalalabad, that seemed to make sense, at least in the abstract. But back at Tora Bora, whenever I was offered a return trip to the front lines, Aouidj Heidi’s brand of existential ethics unsettled me, even with Naveed’s assurances that he was unafraid to go into the hills again. I was certain I could overcome my own fears, deep as they were, about getting close to the fighting once more. But I was unsure whether my conscience could handle the sight of Naveed bloody and broken on some rocky hillside, wounded or worse because of me.

I thought about going without a translator, but then ruled it out since I didn’t even know the local word for “duck.” I could have fired Naveed and hired another translator. But it seemed perhaps an even greater twist of sick logic to choose one of the several English-speaking Afghans hanging around the media camps, deem his life less important than Naveed’s and then offer him a job. And besides, Naveed needed the work.

So I spent most of my time on the so-called second line, where aging mujahedin tanks occasionally blasted at al-Qaida positions in the distance, along with the U.S. bombers, as Eastern Alliance troops rotated in and out of front-line positions.

As it turns out, that next day, Dec. 11, would prove to be a day of great success for the Alliance, but not an unqualified success.

Among the victims was Lavang Khan, who reeled when the first bullet shattered his skull, turning him to fall face forward down a rocky slope as a second shot tore into the small of his back and exited his stomach in a bloody spray, according to Zar Gul, a muj fighter of the Eastern Alliance who was wounded in the leg by the same al-Qaida machine gun fire that cut down Khan. “I tried to catch him,” said Gul.

Gul and his fellow muj fighters told me the story as they sat in the flyblown Jalalabad hospital, later in the week, where the grimy windows rattled with relentless bomb explosions from U.S. airstrikes on Tora Bora.

Gul missed in his reach, and watched Khan tumble some 50 meters over the barren rocks. Elsewhere on the hill, Osama bin Laden’s forces were beating off the assault with heavy guns and mortars. It was here that al-Qaida’s intense fighting first triggered suspicions that they were guarding something of particular value here in the mountains, perhaps bin Laden himself.

His leg bleeding, Gul crawled past Khan’s body in retreat to regroup with the rest of his mujahedin, who waited until nightfall settled over the rolling moonscape at the base of Tora Bora before going back for Khan and the bodies of two others who were killed, Gul Rahaman and Katib Khan.

Mamoon Khan found Khan’s brutalized body. His legs were twisted, apparently snapped in the fall. His chest and neck appeared beaten in, as though someone had bludgeoned the corpse with a rock or rifle butt.

“He looked very beautiful,” said Mamoon Khan, a youngish fighter with smooth skin, flinty eyes and a silky black beard. “He was just lying there.”

But as Mamoon gathered up Khan’s remains, he noticed a scrap of paper on the ground where the body had been. Uneducated, Mamoon Khan couldn’t read the handwritten Pashto. So he took Lavang Khan and the paper back to his commander, who told him the note was a message from al-Qaida.

“It said, ‘You are Muslims, we are Muslims; we don’t have to fight each other,’” said Haji Zahir, the commander. “Send Americans for us,” the note read.

Haji Zahir showed the note to the rest of his troops. After passing the paper around, one of the fighters pocketed it and took the missive back to the front lines in Tora Bora, where some 2,000 mujahedin from three different factions in eastern Afghanistan fought on. But when al-Qaida lost huge swaths of Tora Bora real estate around their caves after this, the first major mujahedin advance, there was promising news: The Eastern Alliance began to say the war was won. Al-Qaida fighters had radioed provincial military chief Cmdr. Haji Mohammed Zaman to say they wanted to surrender.

At the time, Zaman was thrilled. “This is the best day,” he said, sitting on the floor of one of the abandoned village farmhouses that the mujahedin forces have been using as forward bases in the valley below Tora Bora. Rocking and holding hands with a fierce-looking bodyguard, Zaman laughed with a small group of his fighters, his front-line commander Sayed Mohammad Pahlawan and Jalalabad Mayor Ghafar, who goes by one name like many Afghans.

Describing Tuesday’s heavy fighting, Zaman said he told his men ahead of the attack that “if you’re going to die, die running,” before ordering the charge on al-Qaida positions.

“They went,” Zaman said, shrugging and turning up his palms in humored surprise.

Zaman seemed relaxed, his watery eyes sagging on his leathered face, as he broke the daily Ramadan fast that evening with a dinner of stale nan, greasy rice and stewed lamb.

“This is the end,” said Zaman, who told me that the al-Qaida leaders were discussing their surrender terms among themselves that night in Tora Bora and would negotiate a formal cease-fire with him early Wednesday morning.

But, of course, it didn’t happen quite like that.

On Wednesday morning, Zaman woke early and went to the front lines with Ghafar, Pahlawan and a group of other Eastern Alliance field commanders to meet area militia leader Hazrat Ali, also part of the Eastern Alliance force, and open radio surrender talks with al-Qaida. Zaman raised the foreign fighters on the radio and immediately asked them who was in command, thinking he may well hear the voice of bin Laden, who was rumored to be hiding in the caves. But the al-Qaida fighters didn’t respond, leaving dead air on the radio that stirred suspicions Ali had voiced many times.

“Ali doesn’t trust Arabs,” said Samullah, a nephew of Ali who moves in the commander’s inner circle and was present for the initial surrender talks. “We’re afraid. Arabs just want to kill themselves. They might kill us with them.”

As the radio silence lengthened, Ali turned to Zaman and urged him and the other commanders to break off talks and renew attacks immediately. Samullah and Pahlawan said Ali told Zaman that the al-Qaida fighters might be plotting something like the surrender in Konduz, Afghanistan, where Afghan Taliban and foreign fighters gave themselves up to Northern Alliance rebel forces, only to stage a suicide prison revolt.

Zaman and the others were convinced, and the ground war began again much to the liking of Ali, who, along with U.S. officials, had remained skeptical about the peace offer.

“Ali never wanted surrender talks,” said Samullah. “Ali just wants to kill them.”

The mountains were echoing with machine-gun fire and the chuff and whump of mortars again by 10 a.m. Wednesday. Overhead, U.S. planes guided by American Special Forces on the ground with the mujahedin stepped up airstrikes, which had continued Tuesday night unabated.

“There’s no way except for fighting with the Arabs for us,” said Pahlawan, a burly heavyweight of a commander who allowed me to visit the front lines the afternoon before Tuesday’s assault.

Afterward, he laughed as I told him how we were shelled Monday afternoon as we peered at enemy positions from across a ravine dividing al-Qaida and the mujahedin. Calling me his “best friend,” he said I could go back to the front lines anytime I wanted with him and his men. Unlimited access to the front was probably the most gracious gift a commander could offer to journalists, who have been kept away from most of the fighting at Tora Bora. I was deeply grateful, but not interested.

Noor Rahman, meanwhile, hitched rides easily to and from the front to shoot video he later sold to television networks — and gather notes for me. In the evening, Noor would come down from Tora Bora and he and Naveed and I would join one of the Eastern Alliance commanders for dinner, hoping we would be offered a place to stay afterward. Usually we crashed with Pahlawan, who wore pork chop sideburns and a mustache instead of the seemingly mandatory beard grown by all the other fighters and commanders.

“You are my special friend,” he would tell me again and again, smiling and nodding but never laughing as he offered me food, shelter, money, front-line tours and basically anything at his disposal I wanted or needed. He was this way with me after four conversations, the longest of them being an hour.

He confided that he wanted his third wife to be American, preferably 18, and that he hoped to live with her in the United States for a few years before bringing her into his family in Afghanistan.

He wanted to know if I was married, a question I was constantly asked by mujahedin fighters. I said I wasn’t. He told me that, if I became a Muslim, he would find an Afghan wife for me and the two of us could live in his house in Jalalabad after nuptials. I tried to politely demure, saying I didn’t feel ready for a commitment to marriage or religion.

As we talked quietly one evening, with the crunch of distant bombs in the walls, smoke from the wood-burning stove slowly filled the room where we sat until our eyes stung. An underling fighter brewing our tea had stacked the logs badly. Pahlawan rubbed his eyes with his massive, dust-caked hands, rose and stomped to the furnace, his heavy brow bunched in anger. In one motion, he hit the fighter across the back with an open hand, knocking him to the floor, and reached into the burning stack of wood to toss out the loose log that was causing the problem before sitting down next to me again.

“You are just my best friend,” he said. “Can you get me a visa?”

On a day when a reporter visited, Zaman sat on a red carpet spread over the sunny lawn of his courtyard, where roses, daisies and carnations were in bloom beneath rows of orange trees. At least 100 men in shawls, turbans or pakols (the ubiquitous oversized wooly berets) waited to see Zaman, who rested against an embroidered velvet pillow with a Russian Makarov pistol in a leather holster close at his side.

One man came to Zaman complaining that his car had been stolen. Zaman asked to see the car’s papers, which the would-be plaintiff didn’t have. He was told to find the papers and return the next day.

Then one of Zaman’s lieutenants stepped forward to say a local baker was refusing to give bread to his troops. Zaman signed a scrap of paper. Show the baker this, Zaman said, and you’ll get your bread.

Another aggrieved Jalalabad resident said his house had been taken over by squatters. Zaman said this was a “big problem” and that he needed to pray about it. Come back tomorrow, Zaman told the man, who went away before fully explaining the situation.

After several hours, Zaman finally sighed, “Enough, enough” and waved away dozens for the day.

“Everything here is a problem,” Zaman said. “There is no law and also the people are hungry. There is no education. There is nothing.”

But Jalalabad does have the beginnings of something uncommon elsewhere in Afghanistan — a working peace. And Zaman, along with the two other warlords now sharing the job of ruling the city, plays a key role in maintaining calm in a city, like much of the country, with a history of political tumult and war.

Taliban forces abandoned Jalalabad last week, after more than a month of U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan allowed Northern Alliance rebel forces to push the Islamic militia from virtually all the areas in northern Afghanistan to their last remaining stronghold in Kandahar. The first to arrive in Jalalabad as the Taliban were retreating was Hazrat Ali, a rebel commander backed by the Northern Alliance, who swept into the dusty mountain city with some 6,000 fighters.

A day later, former provincial Governor Haji Abdul Qadir was on the scene with a force of his own, as was Zaman, Qadir’s brother in exile during Taliban rule.

Both ethnic Pashtuns with large followings in the Jalalabad region, Qadir and Zaman fled Afghanistan for Pakistan as Taliban forces toppled city after city in Afghanistan during their rise to power in 1996. But Islamabad, backing the Taliban at the time, deported them both in 1997. Zaman, who made his name as a mujahedin commander during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, won asylum in France, where he enjoyed a comfortable banishment in Dijon before returning to the region in recent weeks.

Qadir, meanwhile, sought refuge briefly in Germany before joining Northern Alliance rebels clinging to a sliver of northern Afghanistan. In doing so, he bridged an ethnic gap between the Pashtuns and the primarily Uzbek and Tajik forces of the Northern Alliance. Qadir, a brother of executed Taliban opposition leader Abdul Haq, also remade an image of himself tarnished by his willingness to let Osama bin Laden settle near Jalalabad in 1996 and widespread rumors that he accepted a $10 million cash bribe from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to hand over Jalalabad to the Taliban. But that’s all past, and it’s now Qadir who, in title, is the man leading a liberated Jalalabad.

Qadir and Zaman began shoring up allies among Afghan refugees in Pakistan and underground oppositionists in Afghanistan shortly after Sept. 11, as the United States sounded a death knell for the Taliban. Last week, with onetime Taliban ally Ali moving into Jalalabad, they put ragtag armies of mostly mujahedin veterans on the march in a countermove on the city.

For days, it remained unclear who would take charge of Jalalabad as rival armies prowled the roads, packed in pickup trucks bristling with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers.

Maulana Yunis Khalif, an elder cleric in Jalalabad who the Taliban officially left the city to, convened a local council to sort things out. Qadir emerged amid tense negotiations as the governor of the Nangarhar province to retake the seat he held from 1992 to 1996 during the doomed government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was president of Afghanistan at the time and now presides over a rebel-held Kabul.

With Zaman in charge of the city guards, Ali became the police chief, responsible for securing the roads into Jalalabad and the city’s one airport.

Despite lingering tensions, the agreement has held, and an edgy calm has settled over Jalalabad, with Zaman, Ali and Qadir working to restore some sort of normalcy in the city while awaiting the outcome of ongoing U.N.-brokered negotiations on a central government.

The supposed hierarchy is, however, out of step with reality, as Ali remains the most powerful figure in Jalalabad. Ali’s grip on the city is visible in the countless stickers emblazoned with the image of slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, which his troops have slapped on seemingly every other door and window in town. Bands of Ali’s men guard everything of any importance in the city, including roughly 500 prisoners taken in Jalalabad when the city fell.

Among them is Shizad, an 18-year-old from Karachi who goes by one name, who said that Ali’s men pulled him from a car at a checkpoint last week when he tried to flee Jalalabad during the Taliban retreat.

“We came to fight against America,” Shizad said. Shizad never saw any action because the Taliban was already folding as he arrived in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, he said. Now he sits on a floor mat bed next to rotting vegetable peels in a locked room of the Jalalabad airport basement with six other prisoners who say they have no idea what will happen to them.

The base commanders say they’re waiting for a decision from Ali, who usually questions his captives before unilaterally deciding their fate. But Ali’s been too busy to talk to prisoners.

As Jalalabad’s strongman, Ali has no use for trappings such as Zaman’s pristine gardens or Qadir’s erstwhile royal palace. Instead, he carries his seat of power with him as he speeds through Jalalabad in a cream-colored Toyota land cruiser with chrome trim, followed always by a pickup truck full of heavily armed men.

“What do you want?” Ali said sharply to me as he sat on a balcony at the dilapidated Spin Ghar Hotel, where he usually stops briefly once a day to make satellite telephone calls.

Around him stood a dozen armed bodyguards, aides and hangers-on shuffling idly through a litter of spent batteries, scraps of duct tape, cigarette butts, empty water bottles and chicken bones scattered under mismatched chairs and overturned cargo furniture.

When I asked whether, as has been reported, he smashed a radiophone in anger when Qadir was named governor, Ali dismissed the story as “propaganda.”

“I took this place by my own force, not with Qadir or any others,” said Ali, who wore a short-cropped reddish beard and an oversized green army jacket. “I don’t want to be a governor. I just want to help my people bring peace.”

Zaman and Qadir have voiced similar calls for peace, and all three men have pledged support for 87-year-old former Afghan monarch King Zahir Shah, touted by the United Nations as a unifying figurehead who could oversee a transitional government in Kabul.

“Jalalabad and Nangarhar is a symbol in all Afghanistan,” said Nasrullah Arsalai, another one of Haq’s seven remaining brothers, who has become the unofficial gubernatorial spokesman.

“We do have a big job,” Arsalai said. “Now we are concentrated at the moment here in this region, eastern Afghanistan, bringing security, stability here. After that, we will concentrate on all Afghanistan.”

But it is likely to be a long while, if ever, before the warlord triumvirate can begin work outside Jalalabad, which still looks and feels like a battle zone.

At Ali’s airport, U.S. bombers and cruise missiles destroyed the radar, cratered the one runway, obliterated a helicopter on the tarmac and shattered the windows of the control tower and the tiny base mosque.

Zaman’s fort, called Quleurdo, is in worse condition. When the Taliban occupied Quleurdo a month ago, American missiles turned barracks, tanks, armored personal carriers and artillery guns into fields of scorched rubble strewn over twisted metal wreckage.

Refugees from Kabul and other areas have settled on the arid plains at the entrance of the city facing the nearby Pakistani border. Bullet holes scar many of the city’s mud-brick walls. Gangs of young men brandish heavy arms at checkpoints on all the main roads and intersections.

U.S. warplanes struck twice last week at caves in the barren mountains around the Jalalabad, shaking houses in the city for the first time since the opening days of the U.S. attacks in early October. Qadir and other Jalalabad leaders say some 1,500 fighters loyal to the Taliban and suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden are believed to be hiding on the outskirts of the city. (Ali thinks bin Laden himself may be in the nearby highlands, called Torabora.)

A day after the mountain air strikes, U.S. bombers dropped leaflets written in Dari and Pashto on Jalalabad itself, scattering dollar-size bin Laden “wanted” posters and anti-Taliban fliers that almost every resident has pocketed.

“We will give $25 million to a person who catches bin Laden or gives information about him,” reads one leaflet with a picture on the right side of bin Laden wagging a finger. On the left side there’s a picture of bin Laden clutching bars in a jail cell. In the middle there’s an arrow connecting the two images over a stack of fanned-out $20 bills.

“Exile foreign terrorism,” reads another flier showing red cross hairs on a group of masked gunman cheering with rifles against a desert backdrop.

Though reminders of war are everywhere, by day at least there’s peace in Jalalabad, where a slow swirl of cars, trucks and scooter rickshaws moves through loose goats, stray dogs, donkey carts and camels in front of colorless concrete buildings lining crumbled streets.

“It’s still not normal,” said Ghafar, the installed Jalalabad mayor who also goes by one name. “People are afraid.”